In court documents from the FTC vs Microsoft case, Google Stadia’s former product lead Dov Zimring was called to discuss the cloud gaming platform and competition in the gaming space. This led to several comments on why Stadia couldn’t compete in the industry from Google’s own point-of-view.
Exactly what you expected: lack of players led to a lack of games, which led to an even bigger lack of players, and so on. What surprises me most is not that this happened – but the fact they were surprised by this? I mean, getting a foothold in the gaming industry is incredibly hard, and requires you to be 110% in, and for the long haul at that. You have to be in all the way for the long term – anything less and you might as well not even try.
I am baffled that nobody at Google was like – if we do this, we have to commit to at least ten years of perseverance, through lean times with few subscribers and massive investments and losses, only to recoup them later once the ball starts rolling. Consoles are sold at a loss for a reason.
Still not understanding why I would want to give up fully-functional, permanent, offline media, for services like these. Best possible outcome is that there would be much more lag than a game running on a personal machine on my desk, and it would cost more to play five years from now because subscription fees constantly go up. And that’s if the providers still feel like letting me play the particular obscure games that I’m into. I also can’t take the games apart and mod them either.
Shame its gone. XCloud is complete garbage compared to it. I loved playing Cyberpunk on Stadia. Theirs was the most polished version. lol
Some games had the small text problem. Especially Elder Scrolls.
The lesson in all this: Like Cloud Computing (Sun Microsystems), it was too early to make it mainstream. Market wasn’t ready.
Of course.
They had really good tech since day one. To be honest, they had really good tech years before that. (Wish one day I can tell more, or someone from the team maybe writes a book in the future).
There was no problem running games as if they were local. For most people without access to next gen consoles, they would even run better than local. (Some of the things are due to being copied by others, ~5 years later, look at the recent Xbox leaks).
The problem was messaging. Even those in the gaming media, or worse those in gaming investor market did not realize there was a free tier. It was always “why have a subscription on top of paying full price for games?”
It was either: subscribe and get some free games, or use the free tier and pay for the games.
And then the death spiral mentioned here happened. It was actually worse, since Google did not do the right moves and invest more into the market. One would see the gaming market is very much about the image, and Xbox for example investing $7 billion in Bethesda gave a very strong signal “players we are here to stay”. What did Google did in response to this very announcement? Shattered internal studios and became a third party only platform.
What message does that give to the players in terms of confidence?